• 10
  • February
    2011

A 51-year-old French man recently filed a suit against British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, claiming that his Parkinson's medication caused him to become addicted to gambling and gay sex.

The man's medication, sold under the name Requip, works by relieving motor symptoms of Parkinson's-such as shaking, stiffness, and slowness-by activating dopamine receptors in the brain. Dopamine is a reward signal in the brain, and is connected to pleasurable activities, as well as motivation, cognition, memory and learning.

Up to 1 million people in the United States have Parkinson's disease, and about 60,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. Medicines like Requip can help patients slow the progression of Parkinson's, allowing them to live a relatively normal life for 15 years or more from the time of onset.

Serious and dramatic side effects of medications like Requip are rare, but include "hypersexuality, gambling, and excessive shopping," according to sources. According to a study published by the Archives of Neurology, as much as 17 percent of people receiving treatment for Parkinson's disease exhibit impulse control disorder. In sensitive individuals, medications used to treat Parkinson's disease can have dramatic effects, causing patients to throw out their moral values in favor of risky and destructive behavior.

In 2008, a district court in Minneapolis, MN ordered Pfizer and Beohringer Ingelheim, makers of Miraplex, to pay a man $8.2 million in gambling losses and punitive damages. In 2010, the makers of Cabaser and Permax-Pfizer and Aspen Pharmacare respectively-were sued by over 100 patients because of sex and gambling addictions related to the drugs.

Such medications now contain warnings about impulsive behavior, but the man in this case says that when he began taking Requip in 2003, there were no adequate warnings in place for consumers. After two years of taking the drug, his career was allegedly going downhill and he suffering psychological trauma as a result of his addictions. He claims that he spent his family savings and resorted to stealing in order to finance his gambling habit. He also claims to have been raped as a result of engaging in risky gay sex.

According to a spokesman for Glaxo, the company began attaching warnings to the packing in July of 2005, and later expanded them in 2006.

Source: ABC News, "Man Says Parkinson's Drug Made Him Addicted to Gambling and Gay Sex," Katie Moisse, 2 Feb 2011.